useIsomorphicLayoutEffect React hook

The Back Story about your Javascript Metaphor

Check this gnarly snippet, dudes and dudettes! We've got ourselves a rad custom hook called useIsomorphicLayoutEffect that's ready to shred. This bad boy is like an isomorphic version of useLayoutEffect and can rock out in both server-side rendering and client-side rendering jams. 🎸

The javascript Story!

The hook

1export const useIsomorphicLayoutEffect =
2  typeof window !== 'undefined' ? useLayoutEffect : useEffect;

Usage

This snipp defines athe hook useIsomorphicLayoutEffect. The purpose of this hook is to provide an isomorphic version of the useLayoutEffect hook, which can be used in both server-side rendering and client-side rendering environments.

To understand why this is useful, let's first take a look at the difference between useLayoutEffect and useEffect.

useEffect is a hook provided by React that allows you to perform side-effects in a functional component after the component has rendered. This can include fetching data from an API, updating the DOM, or subscribing to events.

useLayoutEffect is a similar hook to useEffect, but it runs synchronously immediately after React has performed all DOM updates. This means that any updates to the DOM made by useLayoutEffect will be visible to the user before the browser has a chance to paint the screen. This can result in a smoother and more responsive user experience, but it can also cause performance issues if the updates are too heavy.

Now, let's say you are building a React app that needs to support both server-side rendering and client-side rendering. In a server-side rendering environment, there is no browser DOM available, so running useLayoutEffect would cause an error. However, you still need to perform some kind of side-effect to ensure that the component renders correctly on the server.

This is where useIsomorphicLayoutEffect comes in. By using typeof window !== 'undefined' to check if the code is running in a browser environment, useIsomorphicLayoutEffect can switch between useLayoutEffect and useEffect depending on the environment. This means that your code can be written once and used in both server-side and client-side rendering without any issues.

Example

For example, let's say you have a component that needs to fetch data from an API and render it to the DOM. You can use useIsomorphicLayoutEffect to perform the fetch on the client side using useLayoutEffect for a smoother user experience, while using useEffect on the server side to ensure that the component renders correctly:

1// /components/MyComponent.jsx
2
3function MyComponent() {
4  const [data, setData] = useState(null);
5
6  useIsomorphicLayoutEffect(() => {
7    fetchData().then((response) => setData(response));
8  }, []);
9
10  if (!data) {
11    return <div>Loading...</div>;
12  }
13
14  return <div>{data}</div>;
15}

• Explanation: fetchData is a function that returns a Promise that resolves to the data we want to render. useIsomorphicLayoutEffect is used to perform the fetch on the client side using useLayoutEffect, while using useEffect on the server side. The if (!data) check ensures that the component displays a "Loading..." message until the data has been fetched and rendered to the DOM.

This snippet can be usefull for library like GSAP 😁

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